Dear colleagues, 
The following is the information from RELO, U.S. Embassy, Beijing, that you might be interested in. Please spare your time and join them for a discussion.

Tuesdays with RELO
Our English Roundtable Webchat Community is growing, thanks to the support of our colleagues across China, in the region, and more importantly, to teachers like you. We are so glad to see that more and more teachers are starting to show up in the chats and that more of you feel more comfortable sharing ideas, best practices, problems and solutions in your teaching.
We have learned from our past chats that one of our teachers’ frequent concerns is that they lack access and sufficient means to the resources that will keep them up to date professionally. To help address this concern, starting from this month, we’d like to do a series of webchats around Teachers’ Professional Development. We have chosen three topics for our next three webchats that we think are important to teachers’ professional development: Peer observation, Reflective teaching, and Action research.
We are now inviting you to join us in our Tuesday English Roundtable Webchat BETWEEN 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm. Please see below for detail:

Time and Topic:
Peer Observation: 4: 00 pm Beijing time (8 am GMT +8) Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Abstract: Observation is one of the best tools in our profession for aiding in professional development. However, this tool has been used predominantly as an administrative tool. As a result, many teachers fear being observed. As a professional development tool, there is nothing to fear and much to gain. Peer observations benefit both the observer and the one being observed, as long as there is a respectful and focused dialog following the observation. In this month’s English Roundtable Web Chat we want to discuss how to make peer observation a strong professional development tool for you. We will explore the process from pre-observation tasks to the post-observation discussion.
Reflective Language Teaching: 4:00 pm Beijing time (8 am GMT +8) Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Doing action research: 4:00 pm Beijing time (8 am GMT +8) Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Venue: https://statedept.connectsolutions.com/englishroundtable